Saturday, November 17, 2012

And plead and beg

A Creative Life, from Alt NYC

An infographic I've been meaning to post for a while, that I found courtesy of A Single Layer.It really captures some things I've been thinking about lately--to start with, do what you live. Like the whole jobs thing, unemployment as a crisis. I truly believe that the forty-hour-a-week job with some big company and benefits is going away, along with traditional manufacturing jobs. And what's rising in its place is cottage industry, small business--people making soap or jam or pickles or books or kayaks in their basement and selling them, mainly on the cyber-web.

Jobs can't be created ex nihilo, not by Democrats, not my alleged "job creators," not by anyone. Just by ourselves. We create our own jobs, we shape our own lives. So just do what you love, whatever it is.

Is it that simple? Not really. Because there's all the rest of the stuff on the list, which mainly involves other people. The community, the church, collaborative partners--whatever you want to call it.

My favorite example is Gaughin and Van Gogh, as much as they are over-used models for the creative genius. But how great is that? You go out and paint all day, earn barely enough rent to cover the upper room in your yellow house, and then you come home and get drunk and argue about the meaning of the horizontal and vertical line and cut off your ear and hang out with harlots. Maybe that's what all of us need in life.

Herman Melville said it:

About Me

I grew up in Bangkok and Manila and still use wanderlust as an excuse to adventure, occasionally. I backpacked the Appalachian Trail in 2004 and the California section of the Pacific Crest Trail in 2005. Currently, I attempt to homestead.